A/N: Enchanted Forest, missing year.
"I do NOT snore!"
He sleeps in the tent adjacent to hers, just a stone's throw away. He and his boy, the one with the mop of curls, soft at her fingertips as she reads him a story before bedtime approaches and his papa summons him back to his tent. The one with the dimples to die for, the dimples that Regina is convinced must've come from his mother, because the matching pair his father sports—well, they're far too infuriating, too irksome to be related to Roland's.
The boy whose presence softens the heartache her own son has left behind, so that on some days when she's suffocating, he makes it just a little easier to breathe. Makes her feel not quite so out of her element, so far away from her castle as she is, sleeping on the ground and in someone else's forest (let alone someone that she simply can't stand).
The boy who is now tugging gently on her hair, half of it pinned up and the rest loose and unraveled, as he urges her to continue the story she's just stopped telling mid-sentence.
"What's that sound?" she asks abruptly, finger paused right at the point where James is about to find that his giant peach is infested with loquacious, life-sized bugs.
"Papa," Roland responds right away. "Sleeping."
"He sleeps very loudly," she frowns, and the boy in her lap giggles his agreement. It's been a fair few weeks since they've come to this living arrangement, camped out in the last bit of forest that has yet to see a single winged beast or a vindictive green witch on a broom. Still, Robin and his Merry Men keep watch through the day, and come just beyond twilight he returns to tuck his boy safe into bed. Regina always wakes to his soft footfalls as they take him back out to patrol, and she'll toss and she'll turn until they bring him back in for the night.
She is, after all, a light sleeper; the barest brush of the autumn leaves, or a breezy wind at her tent, will drag her from her dreams. (That's what she tells herself, anyway.)
But she's never heard him snore like that before, and never quite this early.
"Can I sleep here tonight, Regina?" he begs her with wide brown doe eyes that she can never say no to (and she will learn her lesson later, that he his dimples are, indeed, not the only thing he's inherited from his father). "Pleeeease? I don't want to wake Papa."
Though it's probably more likely that his papa will keep the rest of them from sleeping at all, Regina gives her consent, soothes, "Of course you can, Roland," followed by a fond tap on the nose. He responds with a small whoop—the prospect of a sleepover at the Queen's is something his papa always vehemently shoots down ("My boy, what have I told you about bothering Her Majesty and overstaying your welcome," despite her unheard protests that he is no trouble at all). He claps a small hand over his mouth before Regina has a chance to shush him, although, truth be told, she suspects it'll take a lot more than that to raise the dead from their sleep.
So it's with Roland tucked and curled into her that she wakes with a start the next morning, when a stream of light and an anxious cry fill her tent as the flap is thrown wide open.
"Roland?" she hears in a voice all panic and dismay. "Oh, my boy. Thank the gods!"
"Papa?" comes a sleepy little sigh from her arms. "Papa…why are you yelling? Don't wake up Regina."
Robin drops to a crouch in front of them both, looking immensely relieved beyond belief. "You needn't worry about waking the Queen, your absolute fool of a father has already had the honor of doing so. Come here, my boy." And he tugs Roland out of Regina's embrace, hugs him within the green folds of his cloak. The boy snuggles up to his chest, smacks his lips once or twice as his eyelids begin to droop.
"He's always safe with me, you know," Regina says then, quietly, annoyed with how defensive she sounds.
Robin's gaze meets hers as he brings Roland closer. "I know," he tells her, and she can tell from his eyes that he means it. "Thank you, for looking after him. I don't know what I would've done had I not found him here." And the smile he gives her now, it warms her in places that have been so cold they'd gone numb, places that maybe, just maybe, she'll be able to feel again someday.
Roland is mumbling something, something Regina doesn't quite catch, that has Robin tilting his ear down close to his son's mouth.
"I do not snore," he says indignantly then, and she feels the beginnings of a laugh bubble up in her lungs.
"Do too," argues the miniature version of him (dimples and all, she supposes with a sigh). "Regina and I heard it last night."
"Rubbish," Robin is saying with a shake of his head as he stands, Roland finally starting to nod back off, and when he turns them toward the light sneaking in from outside, that's when she sees it and gives a gasp of surprise.
"What's wrong with your face?" she asks suddenly, and Robin looks appropriately taken aback.
"I beg your pardon, milady?"
"Your—nose," she clarifies. "It's…" Well, quite frankly, it looks broken. Skin mottled and an impressive shade of purple across the bridge, though thankfully not swollen or bent in at an odd angle. Her eyes narrow further as she takes in the rest of him, now that she can. His cloak is caked in mud where it drags down to the ground—that's no surprise. But his trousers bear fresh grass stains just above where boot meets knee, there's a tear in his sleeve that hadn't been there before, and–is that blood?
He looks chagrined, and she doesn't realize she'd uttered that last part out loud until he's answering her, hastily, "It's not mine."
"Am I supposed to find that reassuring?" she hisses, and he looks genuinely confused for a moment.
"I didn't realize Your Majesty cared," he says.
"I care about Roland," she reminds him testily. "And this?" She gestures up and down at the rather alarmingly banged up sight of him. "This is not something Roland would care for."
Robin hums in agreement, but then says, maddeningly, "I had my reasons."
"Reasons," Regina repeats. What the hell is wrong with this man?
"Let's just say I got into an altercation," he shrugs, earning an exasperated snort, to which he responds with one of those smirks she simply can't stand. "But all is right now. You ought to see how the other one fared."
"Was it a flying monkey?" she asks with some consternation, wondering why she wouldn't have been the first to be called if something had come up during nightly patrol.
"Not a flying one, no," he says vaguely, and she frowns, tries to question him further, but he'll have none of it now, bidding her good morning as he slips out of her tent, his boy now fast asleep in his arms.
Regina glowers through the rest of her day—a common enough occurrence, but she's radiating fury in waves today, to offset the crispness of the cool fall air, and people keep away from her even more so than usual (which is completely fine by her). One of the many Merry Men—it's hard to keep them straight, they're all so…similarly unkempt, with a generally homeless look about them—seems to share in her overall vexation, skulking and frowning by the campfire, periodically ladling the stew while nursing a split upper lip. His left eye is a brilliant palette of blues and greens to rival the state of Robin's nose, and she wonders if maybe they'd fought off the same creature together, but can't quite bring herself to ask.
She doesn't think anything more of it until later that evening, when she's said her goodnights to the Charmings and makes her way back to her tent. She'll have just enough time before Roland stops by, she's thinking—time to wash up and unwind her hair from the mess of curls she'd pinned it in to keep it out of her way during the day—when she hears voices arguing in the tent right next to hers.
"That's the last I want to hear of it," she recognizes Robin speaking in low, angry tones.
"But—Robin—"
"Enough," Robin cuts the other man off. "I trust Regina with my son. Which means I trust her with my life."
She stills outside her tent.
The other man is protesting, and then Robin is responding, in a clipped, fuming manner, words Regina can't quite make out, until—"I said that was quite enough. Unless you feel inclined to have more than a conversation about it? To rehash what we already discussed the night before, perhaps?"
Silence follows, Regina's heartbeat in her eardrums, and then the front of Robin's tent ripples and shifts as a figure steps out of it—the man from earlier, she realizes. His lip looks vastly improved from the morning, though she can't say the same for his eye, which he turns balefully her way before walking sulkily off.
It keeps her up long after Roland's come and gone, well into a night filled with the sounds of his papa's labored breathing as it clamors its way through a broken nose. All of a sudden Regina's not quite sure what to make of him anymore, this Robin with his dimples that he's most assuredly passed on to his son.